Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Ashe would eventually disavow the tone and much of the substance of the conservative positions expressed in Advantage Ashe. In retrospect, he and others came to see that his early remarks on civil rights reflected the continuing influence of his father and the perceived necessity of avoiding the pitfalls of white backlash. He was also pushing back against mounting pressure to become more militant. As in-your-face activists such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown gained currency—and as the Black Panther Party made its presence felt in inner-city neighborhoods and even on college campuses such as UCLA, where two student members of the Panther Party would be killed by police in January 1969—Arthur resisted what he termed the “don’t trust the white man” philosophy. “It bugs me,” he complained, “when Negroes give me the African-type advice.”21

  This was how he felt in 1967. Yet by the end of the decade he had become much more sympathetic to the strivings of black activists of all stripes. While he never subscribed to what he saw as the self-defeating principles of racial separatism, he developed a greater appreciation for the sacrifices and frustrations of individuals and groups agitating for radical change. This appreciation, which surfaced during the tumultuous year of 1968, would become more apparent in the 1970s and 1980s, and by the end of his life his assessment of the responsibility of speaking and acting out on behalf of racial justice had come full circle, placing him solidly in the camp of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington’s archrival.

  Written in 1992, Ashe’s final statement on the protest tradition was tinged with guilt and suffused with admiration for “the black men, women, and children who risked their lives during the civil rights movement.” As he pointed out with obvious regret, “While blood was running freely in the streets of Birmingham, Memphis, and Biloxi, I had been playing tennis. Dressed in immaculate white, I was elegantly stroking tennis balls on perfectly paved courts in California and New York and Europe. Meanwhile, across the South, young men and women of my age were enduring pain and suffering so that blacks would be free of our American brand of apartheid.” He acknowledged he had “certainly been offered more than one opportunity to stand up for the movement” and that his refusal to seize these early opportunities could no longer be explained away by the dictates of his rising career on the court. “Some of my friends tried to assure me that I, too, was playing my part in the revolution,” he recalled, “but they never convinced me of it, not completely. There were times, in fact, when I felt a burning sense of shame that I was not with other blacks—and whites—standing up to the fire hoses and the police dogs, the truncheons, bullets, and bombs that cut down such martyrs as Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and the little girls in that bombed church in Birmingham, Alabama. As my fame increased, so did my anguish.”22

  In the late spring and early summer of 1966, Ashe’s anguish, in so far as it existed, was well hidden beneath his carefully measured detachment from the passions of the day. But it wouldn’t be long before the shifting nature of the struggle for freedom and equality forced him to reevaluate his lack of involvement. The shift, which had begun the previous year when the divisions and disagreements among SCLC and SNCC leaders surfaced during the voting rights campaign in Alabama, was exacerbated by differing responses to a series of developments, notably the Watts riot, the escalating war in Vietnam, the legislative initiatives of President Johnson’s Great Society program, and SCLC’s decision to move the epicenter of its antidiscrimination campaigns to the North. Arguments over political philosophy, strategic priorities, the strengths and weaknesses of nonviolence, and the advisability of racial integration led to organizational fragmentation and hard feelings that threatened to tear the movement apart along class, race, and generational lines.

  At issue was the apparent emptiness of the legal and legislative victories of the past decade. Among many working-class and younger blacks there was a growing suspicion that long-awaited civil rights advances, though welcome, had failed to address many of the most pressing problems related to economic and social inequality and systemic discrimination. This disillusionment fueled a new, if often unfocused, militancy that found expression in several forms, ranging from urban riots and cultural nationalism to racial separatism and the emerging political persuasion of Black Power.

  The first clear sign of the new era came near the end of Ashe’s last semester at UCLA, in May 1966, when the nonviolent champion and former Freedom Rider John Lewis lost his bid to serve a fourth term as SNCC’s national chairman. Lewis’s successor, Stokely Carmichael, was a freedom fighter of a different stripe—a brash and assertive New Yorker who refused to rule out violence as a legitimate means of struggle. Born in Trinidad, in the West Indies, Carmichael had grown up on the streets of the Bronx before enrolling at Howard University in 1960. After participating in the Freedom Rides and serving time in Parchman Farm prison in the summer of 1961, he became increasingly disenchanted with interracial cooperation and nonviolence. This growing alienation from much of the movement’s leadership set the stage for his spectacular debut as SNCC’s national chairman in June 1966.23

  The backdrop for Carmichael’s launching of SNCC’s Black Power phase was the “March Against Fear,” a 220-mile journey from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, organized by James Meredith, the courageous Air Force veteran who had desegregated the University of Mississippi in 1962. On June 6, the day after Ashe flew to London to participate in the Beckenham, Kent, grass tournament, Meredith and a small group of companions crossed the Mississippi state line and headed south into the Delta on Highway 51. Twelve miles down the road he was gunned down by a forty-year-old white supremacist named Aubrey James Norvell. Three shotgun blasts put Meredith in the hospital, provoking enough outrage to mobilize a large contingent of civil rights leaders determined to continue the march all the way to the state capital in Jackson.

  Carmichael and SCLC’s chairman, Martin Luther King Jr., were among the leaders responding to the call, and as the three-week-long march progressed, they had ample opportunity to air their differences at the nightly mass rallies held at campsites and other venues along the route. King and his lieutenants preached the gospel of nonviolence, invariably including a ritualistic call-and-response. “What do we want?” they asked, and the crowd roared back “Freedom.” For King and the SCLC this was a tried-and-true method of generating mass enthusiasm, but this time the message of nonviolence did not go unanswered.

  When the march reached the mid-Delta town of Greenwood on June 16, Carmichael, taking full advantage of King’s temporary absence from the state, came up with a rhythmic and dramatic call-and-response ritual of his own. Following the lead of Willie Ricks, a SNCC activist who had experimented with rhetorical references to “Black Power” earlier in the march, Carmichael used the provocative slogan to seize the initiative for his militant stance on the issues dividing the movement. Having spent most of the summer of 1962 in Greenwood, he knew his audience, and he knew what they wanted to hear. “We want black power!” he told them. Repeating the phrase four times, he declared: “From now on when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell ’em.” “What do you want?” he asked over and over again, and each time the crowd roared “Black Power!”

  When King returned to the march the next day, he tried to dissuade Carmichael from using an ambiguous phrase that would inevitably raise the specter of black supremacy and “racism in reverse.” But the proverbial genie was out of the bottle. For the next two weeks, the reporters covering the march talked of little else, fueling a media frenzy that sparked a national debate focused largely on the perceived dangers of Black Power. On June 19, Carmichael flew to Washington to appear on the Sunday morning television show Face the Nation, where he was asked to clarify his controversial slogan’s implications for the future of American democracy and racial harmony. Ranging across a wide variety of issues, he soothed few nerves with his comments on political self-determination for blacks and the irony of a government “dropping bom
bs in Vietnam to ensure free elections there” while refusing to intervene in Mississippi to protect the voting rights of ordinary black people.24

  For the remainder of the summer, Carmichael toured the nation as a spokesman for Black Power, delivering speeches that inspired hope in some circles and outright fear in others. Hailed by some as the new Malcolm X—the Black Muslim leader assassinated in 1965—he grew increasingly militant in his advocacy of everything from racial separation to the antiwar movement. He condemned the recent carpet bombing of North Vietnam while pointing out the bitter irony of asking black soldiers to fight for freedom abroad when they were routinely denied it at home. Appearing on Meet the Press on August 21, he clarified his personal objection to the hypocrisy of current American military policy. “No, I would not fight in Vietnam, absolutely not, and would urge every black man in this country not to fight in Vietnam,” he declared.25

  Ashe, like most Americans, took all of this in from afar and didn’t quite know what to make of it. When he first learned of the March Against Fear, he was in England, and when the Greenwood drama inaugurated the Black Power debate ten days later, he was at Forest Hills in New York. He had hoped to fly to Miami to root for Pasarell and the UCLA Bruins at the NCAA men’s tennis championship. But other commitments prevented him from witnessing his best friend’s triumph in the NCAA singles competition.

  MacCall, who ruled the Davis Cup squad with unbending authority, had ordered Arthur to join his American teammates Riessen and Graebner at Beckenham during the second week of June as a final warm-up for their upcoming tie against Mexico. Scheduled to report for basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington, on June 23, Ashe did not have the option of remaining in England long enough to join the draw at Wimbledon. Traveling across the Atlantic for such a brief stay was hardly worth the effort in his view, and adding insult to injury on the very day of his graduation he was eliminated from the Beckenham tournament by Ray Ruffels, a twenty-year-old unranked Australian.26

  With tennis dominating the final weeks before his stint at Fort Lewis, Arthur did not comment publicly on the emerging Black Power controversy coming out of Mississippi. What he thought about it at the time is subject to speculation, and even a year later, when he discussed a variety of racial issues in Advantage Ashe, he made no mention of Carmichael or the politics surrounding the March Against Fear. He also failed to discuss the matter in his 1981 memoir, Off the Court. Only near the end of his life, as he reflected upon “The Burden of Race” in his final memoir, Days of Grace, did he have his say on the “brilliant harangue in Greenwood, Mississippi, from which, in my opinion, black America has never adequately recovered.” He offered a searing indictment of Carmichael’s approach to the freedom struggle: “In promulgating Black Power, Carmichael wittingly or unwittingly (the former is much more likely) turned his back on the moral emphasis and genuine nonviolence of King’s leadership and moved toward a radically secular philosophy of racial emancipation.” In Ashe’s view, this was “the beginning of the end of dominance of morality in African American culture. Instead, the amoral quest for naked and vengeful power would rule thereafter.”27

  When Arthur reported to Fort Lewis in late June, the March Against Fear was still in progress, and Carmichael’s controversial comments decrying black participation in the war were still percolating. But he soon discovered that Fort Lewis was its own world, cut off from the tumultuous political landscape beyond its borders. From the outset of basic training, he, in his words, “plunged immediately into the simplistic, disciplined, and physical world of the military.” An all-encompassing experience, “it had all the harassment and dehumanization which seem to be required ingredients for creating soldiers.”

  As a trained athlete accustomed to a disciplined life, Arthur did not anticipate any difficulties adapting to Army regulations or to the physical and psychological demands of boot camp. But he encountered an unexpected challenge the very first day when he was thrust into the role of cadet brigade commander. Appointed deputy brigade commander, he was unexpectedly forced to step up when his immediate superior suffered an injury. “We hadn’t gone fifteen yards beyond the gate when the cadet brigade commander stepped into a pothole and sprained an ankle,” he later explained. “He had to be taken to the infirmary; suddenly I was in charge of an entire unit of eight hundred men.”

  Relatively unfazed, Ashe oversaw the brigade without incident for several hours, but the situation went south at the end of the day when he was ordered to march his troops “back to the barracks and line them up in the courtyard so they could be dismissed.” Once they were in the courtyard, he noticed the entire unit was lined up facing the wrong direction, as did one of the training officers, who bellowed “you’ve really got it fucked up, mister.” Forced to march his troops out of the square, “turn them around, and bring them back the way they were supposed to be,” he ended up “terribly embarrassed because I was already in the spotlight over my tennis.”28

  Arthur was not the first sports celebrity to train at Fort Lewis; nor would he be the last. But he stood out nonetheless—not only as one of the few black men in the camp but also as one of the camp’s most popular cadets. Despite his inauspicious beginning, it didn’t take long for him to win the respect of his brigade and most of the camp’s officers. With his low-key, unaffected personality and strong work ethic, he was able to blunt potential animosity related to racial prejudice or personal envy. Blessed with athletic prowess, a fastidious appearance, and a strong, ramrod-straight military bearing, he looked and acted like an Army officer from the outset. Knowing they were almost certainly headed for combat in Vietnam, some of his fellow cadets undoubtedly resented the likelihood that his celebrity status would place him in a cushy stateside assignment. Yet few of his peers seemed to blame Arthur for his privileged position. During his six weeks in camp, he never asked for special treatment of any kind, and he never seemed to complain about anything. He did his share of KP duty and ended up as the second highest rated soldier in his platoon. Though relieved when it was over, he looked back on his time at Fort Lewis as a worthwhile experience. Even in this austere setting, he embraced the opportunity to learn “about weapons, tactics, map reading, and other useful skills,” and he valued the “good friends” that he made along the way.29

  Arthur’s positive attitude reflected his perception that the situation could have been much worse: he could have been assigned to a training camp in the Deep South; and the timing of his induction into the Army could have been set for a date in the immediate aftermath of his basic training. Instead, Army officials had granted him a six-month delay, setting his induction date for February 1967. Most important, he had been assured earlier in the summer that his probable assignment would be at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. While visiting the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in northern New Jersey, he was approached by Bill Cullen, the longtime tennis and squash coach at West Point. Well aware that Arthur would be on active duty within a few months, Cullen presented the young Davis Cup star with an intriguing proposition. “We’d be interested in having you as an assistant tennis coach at the Point,” he declared, adding that the Academy also needed “a data-processing officer.” “The two posts could be combined,” he explained. All Arthur had to do was to apply for data processing training as soon as he received his commission. “I’ll take care of the rest,” Cullen promised.

  Thrilled by Cullen’s offer, Arthur could now look forward to a two-year stint in the Army compatible with his long-term goals as a tennis player. Without making any guarantees, the Army had unofficially informed him that he could expect special leaves to participate in Davis Cup play as well as a limited number of invitational tournaments. While he would miss a majority of the tour, there would be ample opportunity to stay in shape and keep his competitive edge. That was more than he had expected, considering the rising pressure on the Army to maintain a large combat force in Vietnam. Even though he had announced publicly that he was willing to fight in Vietnam, he was in no hurry t
o make good on his pledge.30

  In the meantime, as he waited for the onset of active duty, Arthur had nearly half a year to solidify his position as one of the top amateur players in the nation. Ranked second behind Dennis Ralston at the beginning of 1966, he had visions of moving higher by the end of the year. The opportunity was there with Ralston planning to turn professional by early 1967—and with American tennis at its lowest ebb in years. Moreover, many of the world’s best players had joined the pro tour during the past four years and thus were ineligible to play in amateur tournaments.31

  Coming out of basic training in mid-August, he expected to be a little rusty. But he played surprisingly well in his first post-camp outing, fighting his way into the semifinals of the Hall of Fame tournament in Newport, Rhode Island, before losing to Ralston. He played even better the following week at the U.S. National Doubles Championships in Brookline, where he and Marty Riessen lost a tough semifinal match to the defending champions Roy Emerson and Fred Stolle. With only a few days before the opening of the U.S. National tournament at Forest Hills, he had just enough time to travel to Philadelphia for an ATA benefit event heralded as “National Arthur Ashe Day.” Held at the Philmont Country Club, the event featured exhibition matches between the American and Australian Davis Cup teams, and additional singles matches involving Santana, Drysdale, and other Ashe admirers.

  That night three hundred people filled a banquet hall to hear several speakers praise Arthur’s character. Emerson, who had just vanquished the honoree in Brookline, assured the crowd that “all the players of the world have a great regard for Arthur on and off the court.” Speaking with uncharacteristic emotion, MacCall declared: “I hope if I have a son, he could be like Arthur Ashe.” Though a bit embarrassed, Ashe appreciated the $2,500 raised that evening to support Dr. J’s junior development program.32